the platform and Win32

[monte]

Hi Folks

I'm not sure how or if this should be handled but it just occurred to me that it would be ideal if the platform on windows didn't return Win32 but returned Windows. That way we could use

Code: Select all

the platform&"-"&the processor

in all cases to identify the engine. I guess this would not be a backwards compatible change but we need to look forward to having more than just 32 bit windows builds.

Cheers

Monte

[Mark]

Monte,

My first thought is that it seems logical to me that besides Win32 there would be Win64. Secondly, it really doesn't matter whether the platform returns win32 or windows. We know that win32 means windows. Because we should try to minimize changes that affect backwards compatibility and because one should invest time and money into real changes rather than cosmetic details, I think we should keep this as it is until there is a real need to distinguish between different platforms.

Can you explain to me why the platform & dash & the processor would currently be insufficient to identify an engine?

Kind regards,

Mark

[LCMark]

@monte: I must confess 'the platform' and 'the processor' have always irked me slightly - however the amount of code out there which uses their current values is staggering. This is perhaps something we could think about changing though when we get to Open Language - map platform/processor to legacyPlatform / legacyProcessor and then update platform/processor with more consistent/sane values.

Of course, for the moment 'the platform' being Win32 isn't too much of a problem for 64-bit - 64-bit Windows still implements the 'Win32' API, so it still kind of makes sense...

[mwieder]

Yeah, the "Win32" thing has always bugged me more than slightly. And "MacOS" to represent everything from pre-OSX through Mavericks as well. When I need to check for a Windows platform I just look for

Code: Select all

if "Win" is in the platform

but I know that's just me, and not everyone does that.